updated 03:50 pm EDT, Tue September 13, 2011

Samsung contests ban on Galaxy Tab 10.1, 7.7

Samsung as anticipated has appealed Apple's successful ban on Galaxy Tabs in Germany. The Korean firm didn't outline the grounds on which it would appeal the decision but is expected to argue that Apple's community designs for tablets are too generic. In issuing the ban, the Dusseldorf-based judge had claimed that there were other tablet designs possible than what the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was based on.

The appeal was considered virtually necessary given both the impact on immediate sales and the future. Apple successfully had Samsung pull Galaxy Tab 7.7 demo units from the IFA show flow and may have an injunction barring the smaller Android design from shipping in Germany as well.

Samsung had already been taking a defensive step with public word just this week that it had sued Apple in France.

Its move came just as one of Samsung's representing lawyers, Henrik Timmann, made remarks in an interview with Germany's Die Zeit that incidentally supported Apple's position. He argued that patent disputes were seldom used as weapons but, instead, to get a return on inventions they made that were being used by rivals.

"Companies don't want to impede competition but ensure a fair compensation for the use of their intellectual property or differentiate their products with particularly brilliant product characteristics from their competitors," Timmann said in a translation from Florian Mueller.

His only real issue was with patent trolls like Lodsys or Wi-LAN, which can "block entire companies" despite not contributing anything meaningful to the market.

The remarks are ironic given that they echo statements when Apple first sued HTC. Apple chief Steve Jobs had argued that "competition is healthy" but had insisted that companies like HTC "should create their own original technology, not steal ours," according to the remarks. Many of the lawsuit challenges in question focus as much on Android and general technology rather than HTC-specific inventions and have been interpreted as reflections of Apple and Steve Jobs' view that Google itself was the primary copier.